Twitter doubles its tweet character limit for some users

A lot of real estate agents like to use Twitter, either to promote their listings and web content or to stay in touch with clients, or both. But Twitter has always been a different kettle of fish compared to other social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, being somewhat restrictive due to its 140 character limit in tweets. Well, now that’s changed, because Twitter has just announced its extending that limit to 280 characters for some users.

Increasing the character limit to eliminate the constraints that it says have prevented some users from using the service more often.

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“When people don’t have to cram their thoughts into 140 characters and actually have some to spare, we see more people tweeting,” Twitter added in a blog post announcing the move.

Twitter, which is now 11-years old and boasts 328 million users worldwide, has been struggling to find ways to attract more users for some time. The problem it faces is that it doesn’t want to alienate existing users who like the 140-character limit. Last year, Twitter extended the character limit in a way by letting users post images and GIFs without these adding to the character count in their tweets. But when the company first said it was considering extending the overall limit, some hardcore users criticized the idea, prompting Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey to say the limit would stay.

However, Dorsey has obviously changed his mind. He said in a statement that he realizes some users might have an “emotional attachment” to the 140 character limit, but said that extending it was the right thing to do. “We tried this, saw the power of what it will do, and fell in love with this new, still brief, constraint,” Dorsey said.

For the time being, the 280-character limit will only be available to a small number of users around the world. Once feedback has been obtained, Twitter will then decide whether or not to allow longer tweets to more users for further testing, or to roll it out to every user at once.